By focusing on the same types of story elements as students read multiple books, they begin to get a sense or a feeling about what ways authors create common story elements. By using multple picture books as class read alouds, I can facilitate their understanding of those story elements and point out commonalities between books with similar themes.

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After I finish reading the story, students share what they noticed about the elements in the new story. We begin to fill out our venn diagram, pay attention to one element at a time.

When students shared that some element in one story was different than the other story, I challenged the class to think of how they may also be similar. For example, in one story the main character was becoming a queen while in the other story, she is becoming a princess. However, in both stories, the main character is living a peasant lifestyle and will eventually be married into royalty.

We do this for each category. When I ask the class if anyone can share or add information and very few students are willing to share, I ask them to talk with another student or group in order to spark new ideas.